Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern War. By Laura Doan

Abstract

In 2008, I visited the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) in London to listen to a paper given by Laura Doan. Doan was then in the middle of a new project on queer identities and the First World War, work which was something of a departure from her earlier, formative work, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (2001). Entitled ‘On the Limits and Possibilities of Lesbian History’, what Doan delivered was less a paper and more an outpouring of ideas on the thorny issue of how (or not) to categorize sexual identities. In hindsight, I now understand why Doan was uncharacteristically lacking in conviction and clarity that day. Her paper at the IHR represented the very start of her musings on ‘queer critical history' and the ‘conceptual impasse' that historians of sexuality were confronted with, yet thus far, had been unable to cross. Disturbing Practices represents Doan's attempt to bridge that impasse, and what's clear throughout is that it marks the culmination of years of both introspection and critical engagement with the troublesome relationship between history (and, by extension, gay and lesbian history) and queer theory, the latter a disruptive force, which seeks to upend the comforting linearity that sits at the centre of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) ‘recovery' agenda. Both strands of what Doan calls the ‘genealogical project’, described as either consciously ancestral or avowedly Foucauldian, have been at odds ever since the cultural turn in the 1970s. However, Doan believes that queer theory has much to offer the practice of writing history and she uses Disturbing Practices to suggest a new approach, one that fuses the professional rigour of the historian with the critical fluidity of the queer theorist. Doan calls this ‘queer critical history’, and it is an idea that hinges on unknowability and queerness as method rather than as identity.